Health Entrepreneurship Drivers

Life science entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity through the process of creating customer-defined value by researching, developing, and commercializing biomedical and health ideas, discoveries, and inventions.

There are many new exciting business opportunities for innovators to develop and commercialize their new products and services.

However, the commercialization process is risky, expensive, and time-consuming. To be successful, bioentrepreneurs—whether healthcare professionals, scientists, engineers, investors, or service providers—need to work as a team and/or with their organizations to overcome the multiple hurdles taking their ideas to the market and patients.

The process is neither linear nor predictable and outcomes are never guaranteed. In addition, because of global macroeconomic conditions, investors are unwilling to gamble on unproven technologies in a more hostile regulatory and legal environment. Consequently, commercializing bioscience discoveries is becoming more and more difficult. However, innovators still thrive.

Where are some of these exciting business opportunities for bioentrepreneurs?

An initial understanding of the changes happening in US healthcare is the first step in identifying potential market opportunities.

1. Major and continual health care policy reforms

2. Migration away from fee-for-service payment

3. Consumerization, commoditization, internationalization, customization, and digitization of care

4. Changing from a sick care system to a preventive and wellness system

5. Defined benefit to defined contribution health insurance coverage

6. Rightsizing the health care workforce

7. Do-it-yourself medicine (DIY)

8. Mobile and digical (physical and digital) care delivery models

9. The growth of employed physicians

10. Innovation management systems and increasing attention to health entrepreneurship

11. Increasing demand for high-touch care

12. Increasing discontinuity of care

The global health care and biomedical research and development landscape is changing quickly. All of these changes present biomedical and health care entrepreneurs opportunities to create new products, services, models, and platforms. Patients are taking more control of funding and contributing to basic and clinical research using the Internet and social media, and the Internet and social media continues to play a bigger and bigger role in health care marketing and delivery.

The opportunities in health entrepreneurship are sizeable and physician entrepreneurs are increasing well positioned to capitalize on them.